SF Encyclopedia Home Page
Monday 13 January 2025
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Pagel, Stephen
(? - ) US editor, publisher and reviewer who has also written as Steve Pagel; worked at Barnes and Noble for ten years to 1995, for the last three as chief US genre buyer; was sales director at White Wolf for three years from 1995; and launched Meisha Merlin Publishing with Kevin Murphy in 1997. He co-edited the three Bending the Landscape genre Anthology series with Nicola ...
Continuous Creation
Now relegated to Imaginary Science, this was an essential axiom of the Steady State Universe Cosmology which was proposed in 1948 by Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle but increasingly superseded by the rival Big Bang theory (see George Gamow) since the late 1960s. The notion of an expanding yet essentially unchanging universe required the spontaneous ...
Hitchcock, Alfred
(1899-1980) UK-born Cinema director and producer whose career began in the silent-movie era in 1920 and who achieved global fame as the "Master of Suspense" – dramatic tension achieved through innovative framing and editing, with such trademark devices as camera movements designed to lure viewers into complicity with the viewpoint of the lens. His first successful films were thrillers made in Britain, notably The 39 Steps (1935), based on John ...
Payne, Bernal C, Jr
(1941- ) US author the protagonists of whose Time Travel novel for Young Adult readers, It's About Time (1984; vt Trapped in Time 1986), travels back to 1955 where they meet their parents as teenagers. The future children of their marriage must ensure it takes place. The slightly later Back to the Future, released 1985, was conceived ...
Rome, David
Pseudonym of UK-born television writer David Boutland (1938- ), in Australia from 1951; he began to publish work of genre interest with "Time of Arrival" for New Worlds in April 1961, placing a number of tales in that journal in the years before Michael Moorcock became editor in 1964. His only sf book, Squat: Sexual Adventures on Other Planets (1970), is not his best work. [PN] ...
Langford, David
(1953- ) UK author, critic, editor, publisher and sf fan, in the latter capacity recipient of 21 Hugo awards for fan writing – some of the best of his several hundred pieces are assembled as Let's Hear It for the Deaf Man (coll 1992 chap US; much exp vt The Silence of the Langford 1996; exp 2015 ebook) as Dave Langford, edited by Ben Yalow – plus five Best Fanzine Hugos ...